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Physicist Lisa Randall on the conflict between science and religion

I totally stole this from Tristan (with his permission, of course), but it's just too good. I read Lisa Randall's excellent book Warped Passages a few years ago, and loved it. Her new book Knocking on Heaven's Door is on my short list, but Tristan beat me to it and yanked out a few quotes from her on the conflict between science and religion. I've never known her to have a Dawkinsian anti-religious agenda, but she knows her epistemology and these quotes really capture the heart of the matter:

"For
a scientist, material mechanistic elements underlie the description of
reality. The associated physical correlates are essential to any
phenomenon in the world. Even if not sufficient to explain everything,
they are required."

"The
materialist viewpoint works well for science. But it inevitably leads
to logical conflicts when religion invokes a God or some other external
entity to explain how people or the world behave. The problem is that in
order to subscribe both to science and to a God--or any external
spirit--who controls the universe or human activity, one has to address
the question of at what point does the deity intervene and how does he
do it."

"Clearly
people who want to believe that God can intervene to help them or alter
the world at some point have to invoke nonscientific thinking. Even if
science doesn't necessarily tell us why things happen, we do know how
things move and interact. If God has no physical influence, things won't
move. Even our thoughts, which ultimately rely on electrical signals
moving in our brains, won't be affected...."

"If
such external influences are intrinsic to religion, then logic and
scientific thought dictate that there must be a mechanism by which this
influence is transmitted. A religious or spiritual belief that involves
an invisible undetectable force that nonetheless influences human
actions and behavior or that of the world itself produces a situation in
which a believer has no choice but to have faith and abandon logic--or
simply not care."

"Empirically
based logic-derived science and the revelatory nature of faith are
entirely different methods for trying to arrive at truth. You can derive
a contradiction only if your rules are logic. Logic tries to resolve
paradoxes, whereas much of religious thought thrives on them. If you
believe in revelatory truth, you've gone outside the rules of science so
there is no contradiction to be had."